Memorial to honor 4,000 victims of lynching to be built in Montgomery, Alabama

For the past 30 years, lawyer and social activist Bryan Stevenson ’85 has battled through the courts, defending wrongly convicted death-row prisoners and children prosecuted as adults, while condemning mass incarceration, excessive sentences, and racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Now Stevenson ’85, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, is about to embark on a fight outside the courts to start a national conversation about the painful legacy of slavery, which he said “continues to haunt us today.”

Delivering the 2017 Tanner Lecture on Human Values on Wednesday, Stevenson announced a planned memorial to honor more than 4,000 victims of lynching in the U.S. and a museum that traces the country’s history of racial inequality from enslavement to mass incarceration. They will be located in Montgomery, Ala., a cradle of the Confederacy and a birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. The memorial and museum, scheduled to open in April, are part of Stevenson’s efforts to end the general national silence about slavery, lynching, and segregation.